


Mission

by Ethelfritha



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Friendship, Hawkeye/OC - Freeform, Minor canon divergence, PTSD, PostWar, Tag for Episode: s08e15 Yessir That's Our Baby, What Happened Next
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:13:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26668762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ethelfritha/pseuds/Ethelfritha
Summary: He's a different man than he was in the war. But sometimes he's still on the bus. Postwar. Three-shot.
Comments: 15
Kudos: 23





	1. 1

**Mission**

_ "Her only hope, and that's slim at best, would be sanctuary in one of the old Catholic missions. There's one not too far off. The nuns will keep her cloistered, educate her, and in 15 or 20 years, working with their other monasteries abroad, perhaps they can get her out of Korea." --adapted from "Yessir, That's our Baby" 8x15. _

It's Thanksgiving 1953 and the food isn't as good as he was anticipating. He supposes it's only to be expected; he's been building up the taste of home for three years and nothing could come close to the ideal he's manufactured in his head. That, and he and his dad have never been the world's best cooks.

His dad invites the Kirks from next door. They own Crabapple Cove's only grocery store and have known him since before he was a twinkle in his father's eye. They bring the green bean casserole--canned green beans, canned cream of mushroom soup, pallid bacon crisscrossing the top. There are mashed potatoes slick with butter, perfect maroon rounds of cranberry sauce, a turkey cooked dry as sawdust, pumpkin pie with the edges crinkly and burnt. He doesn't sniff his food. He doesn't compare the lumpy gravy to the substance that extrudes from the back of a cement truck. He takes seconds when his father encourages him to do so.

After dinner, when the Kirks have gone home, his dad makes the same joke he always does, which is that business will be good the next day, what with all the indigestion. It's not really funny, but Hawkeye laughs anyway, just like he always does. He recalls that his father's Thanksgiving letters, received around Christmas, made the same joke.

"I thought about inviting the Gillises," his dad says abruptly.

Hawkeye sips his Scotch. "Yeah?" he says.

"They're moving to Augusta at the new year" his dad says. "Might be nice to see them again before they go."

Hawkeye knows what he's really trying to say, which is that it's a little embarrassing that Hawkeye hasn't been to see the parents of his dead best friend, when the whole town knows Hawkeye was with Tommy when he died. That's what happens when you write your dad about it, and your dad tells the Gillises, and everyone involved lives in a town small enough to fit on a postcard.

So he goes to see the Gillises, and it's every bit as awful as he thought it would be. They are effusively, almost desperately, glad to see him. They wrote him, after, and he wrote back, but now they want to hear about it from his own mouth. In his own words. He does what he can to gentle it, but there's only so far you can sugarcoat a brutal death in an pointless war. They tell him Tommy's publisher is sitting on the manuscript because they're not sure a novel about the Korean conflict will sell.

After he hears that, he goes to the Kirk's store and buys the cheapest rotgut on the shelf. He knows there's folks in the hills who make moonshine potent enough to strip paint, and that's what he really wants. But there's no time for that. When he wakes up the next morning, he's on the couch with a blanket over him. There's a note in his dad's handwriting that says "take the day off." This is not the first time this has happened.

...

It's 1954 and he's quit drinking. Well, almost. Well, mostly almost. He doesn't quit out of revulsion to the alcohol itself. There is no point, morning, noon, or night, that he wouldn't be open to the possibility of a drink, and no form of alcohol that he'd turn down. But it's embarrassing to drink as much as he really wants to in front of his dad; even more embarrassing to buy alcohol in such quantity and at such frequency from the Kirks; most embarrassing of all to drink alone on his bed, hiding the empties at the bottom of his closet.

He has privileges at Portland General, taking out the extraneous tonsils and appendices that trouble the citizens of Crabapple Cove. He removes a benign tumor from Mr. Godwin's colon and while following up overhears a conversation about AA. He goes to a few meetings and it helps a little, although he finds the meetings almost as embarrassing as sneaking bottles of gin up the stairs like a high school senior. But they help him marshal his thoughts, force him to think about certain things, and even though he still falls off the wagon sometimes, he no longer wakes up to find himself excused from work.

He can tell his dad wants to ask, but he never does. Instead, he hands more and more of his practice over to Hawkeye. By the end of the year, just about the only people Daniel Pierce still sees are the children. They don't talk about this. It's just understood that Hawkeye doesn't give vaccines, doesn't see the baby with the measles or the boy with the broken ankle. He doesn't attend births. The townspeople notice, and sometimes they ask. Hawkeye deals with their questions by pretending he did not hear them.

He thought he'd have to contend with questions a lot more than he does, honestly. He thought people would pin him down, want to ask him what it was really like, expect him to regale them with stories. But they don't, not really. He shouldn't have been so surprised. After all, practically every male in Crabapple Cove is a veteran of one war or another; it was only by virtue of being in medical school that he wasn't drafted into World War II himself. Some of the guys want to talk about their times in the war and some don't. He's one of the ones that don't. Mostly, people don't press.

Every once in a while someone will mention that he's a lot quieter these days. He tells them he's making up for lost time and listening to the sea. It's almost the truth.

...

It's 1957 and he's lost touch with Margaret.

Despite all her declarations that what she really wanted to do was settle down somewhere and have a hometown, there's too much nomad in her to stick around in one place for long. The last he hears she's moved to Denver, but when Hawkeye tries to call her up a few months later, the operator can't find a listing. She's moved again, or she doesn't have a phone, or maybe she got married. He could ask Father Mulcahy, who keeps careful tabs on his former flock, or Radar, who has a preternatural ability to know where everyone is, and he keeps intending to write one or the other of them and ask. Tomorrow. Next week. After he looks at the spots in Mrs. Travers's throat.

He still sees Charles sometimes. It's almost difficult not to. He travels to Boston fairly regularly, sometimes for conferences and lectures, sometimes to observe a new technique, sometimes just to go. He likes Boston. He likes the drive, alone in his car on the leafy highway. And while Boston is a big city, it's also a club, especially in the medical world. And Charles Emerson Winchester the Third is a big deal in that club, and not for no reason, either.

So he sees Charles, sometimes even in person. He exchanges the occasional letter with Sherman Potter, finally retired. He hears from Father Mulcahy and Radar the most. He gets Christmas cards from the Klingers. He talks regularly with BJ, driving up the phone bills on both ends. They've managed to visit each other once each, but it's hard. They're both busy, and being located at opposite oceans doesn't help.

The person he sees the most is Trapper John.

They'd heard from each other a time or two, back when Trapper was home and Hawkeye was still stuck in Korea. But there was something in Trapper's letters, something strained and forced. "Glad to be out of that hellhole and moving on with life," Trapper wrote, but Hawkeye got the feeling that he was less moving on and more dragging himself forward. And writing letters back to "that hellhole" wasn't really helping.

At first he expects to run into Trapper at a conference or at least encounter some mention of him at the teaching hospital. Then when he bites the bullet and actually starts poking around, he discovers that Trapper doesn't practice medicine anymore, at least, not in the traditional sense. Instead, he's a medical examiner for the Boston PD.

Hawkeye presents himself at the morgue and tells the attendant that there's a Dr. Jonathan Tuttle here to consult with Dr. McIntyre. Trapper comes out with that million-wat smile. "Dr. Tuttle, so glad to finally put a face to the name!" he says, and the attendant gawps while they clap each other on the back and laugh like hyenas.

They go to a diner. "Trap, haven't you seen enough stiffs?" Hawkeye asks. "What's with the autopsy game?"

Trapper doesn't shy away from the question, but he doesn't answer right away. He tilts his coffee cup this way and that. Finally, he says, "Dead people don't need anything. They don't expect anything. There's no race against the clock with an autopsy. Sure, it's sad sometimes. I see murder victims, accident victims. Kids sometimes, you know? But there's nothing more  _ I _ can do for them. I gotta tell ya, Hawk, that's a relief. It's a relief every day."

He's still married. "I've turned over a new leaf, honest. You wouldn't recognize me. I promised Louise. No more women."

"You?" Hawkeye says, like he doesn't believe him. But he does. It's eight o'clock on a Friday night and they're at a diner, not a bar; they're drinking coffee and eating pie, not getting drunk and picking up women. In a way it's like they've never been apart; in another way it's like they're two entirely different people from the ones who met in Korea.

One cold night in November, Trapper asks if they can go back to his place. Hawkeye has been there before, of course, met Louise and the girls. But this time they are not home. "Visiting her mom for the weekend," Trapper explains. He pours himself a drink, the first time Hawkeye has seen him do so since they renewed their friendship.

"Rough day?" Hawkeye asks.

"Rough as it gets in a line of work where the patients are already dead," Trapper says. He drops into a kitchen chair and rubs his face tiredly. "Kid comes in, a little girl. Couldn't be more'n five. I'm pulling cotton fibers out of her nose and mouth. The detectives come down, ask for cause of death. I tell them she's been suffocated, probably with a pillow. Turns out, her own mom did it. Her own mother! Jesus, Hawk, the things people do to each other--"

Trapper goes on in this vein, but Hawkeye doesn't hear him. Everything is underwater. He can't get a good breath. He can't breathe at all. He sees it, the mother pressing down with the pillow, small legs kicking, small arms grasping at nothing; he sees it, the mother opening her calloused hand, enveloping the baby's face, small legs kicking, small arms grasping at nothing.

He feels cold air on his face and realizes that he's outside. Through the gray haze that spiderwebs across his vision he recognizes the park at the end of the block. He doesn't remember leaving Trapper's apartment. He barks his shins on a bench and sits down on it. His hands are shaking. He can hear his own breathing, loud, harsh in the winter quiet. A car passes, transmission squeaking, and the sound grates hard against his nerves. It occurs to him that he should be cold. But he isn't.

"Hawk!"

Trapper is there, his coat flapping open in the wind. He eyes Hawkeye warily and with concern.

"Sorry," Hawkeye gasps. "Sorry, I'm sorry." He hasn't had a panic attack in a long time. He's never told Trapper what happened in Korea, what happened on the bus. He tells him now. Not everything. Just the basics. The refugees. The wounded. The North Korean patrol. The baby. The mother. His words and her actions.

Trapper is quiet a long time when he finishes. Finally, he says, "you wanna know the real reason why I stopped practicing medicine?"

Hawkeye looks up at him. He's always suspected there's a single reason, something Trapper could look point to and say, "there. That's where it all changed."

"You remember that North Korean who went berserk in OR? Attacked that nurse? Broke the bottle of whole blood my patient was using?"

"You lost that patient," Hawkeye says.

"And I almost killed him for it," Trapper says. "Me, a doctor. Looked a living man in the eye and reached out my hand to kill him. I think I would have done it. I think I would have done it if you hadn't come in."

Hawkeye isn't sure about that. But Trapper clearly is. "Come on," Trapper says. "You must be freezing."

He's a different man than he was in Korea.

But sometimes he's still on the bus.


	2. 2

It's 1960 and Daniel Pierce dies in his sleep.

BJ flies out for the funeral. It's the first time he and Trapper John have met each other. They don't become instant best friends, but they don't hate each other's company, either. The three of them get drunk after the funeral, the first time Hawkeye has been drunk in a long time.

There's the question of what to do with his dad's practice. The assumption in the town, of course, is that Hawkeye will take it over completely.

"Won't you?" BJ asks.

Hawkeye looks out the kitchen window. It's dark outside and the only thing he can see is his own reflection. "Awful lot of kids in this town," he says.

BJ and Trapper are silent, and when Hawkeye turns back he sees they are eyeing each other, having a wordless conversation without him.

"You sure you'll be all right?" BJ asks the next day. He has a thriving practice to get back to, a wife and two kids and a third on the way. But Hawkeye knows that if he says no, he's not all right, BJ will drop everything and stay.

He gives BJ what he hopes is an encouraging smile. "Go on, get out of here. Tell the kids I'll send them a box of lobster big as they are."

He sells the practice to Elliot Collins, a young man just out of residency who has come back to Crabapple Cove to take care of his aging parents. The court of public opinion condemns him for it. They bear no malice towards Elliot--a decent young man from good stock--but they've been going to a Pierce for their doctoring for half a century. They make sure Hawkeye knows just how deeply they feel betrayed by his actions. They hope he realizes just how badly he's let his father down.

He guesses his dad would be disappointed. But he doesn't think he'd be angry. After all, he hadn't come back to Crabapple Cove after med school--never thought about it, honestly, so eager was he to forge his way in the big city, to leave his indelible mark on capital-M Medicine. And his dad had let him go and never made him feel guilty for it.

He packs up the house. On the night before the new buyers take possession, he walks down to the sea one more time. His new apartment in Portland overlooks the bay. But it won't be his sea. It won't be his cove. He wonders fleetingly whether it's too late to back out now, buy back his practice, buy back his house. But he knows he won't. He doesn't really want to.

He thinks it will be difficult to settle into his new job at Portland General. He should have known better. Surgery was always what he wanted to do, what he always excelled at. Within the year he's appointed the head of trauma surgery. Soon he's being invited to Boston not to observe but to demonstrate.

He doesn't introduce himself as Hawkeye anymore. His colleagues and patients refer to him as Dr. Pierce. His new friends call him Ben.

...

It's 1963 and the times, they are a-changin'. There are two female surgical residents, which is a 200% increase from last year. Women are protesting all over the country. They want fair pay and equal rights. Hawkeye takes an avuncular sort of interest in their cause. He remembers the nurses at the 4077th, how they worked their sweet little behinds off for half of his own pay. And of course, he has his own reasons for supporting the Pill and other forms of legalized birth control.

One day, one of his residents, Beth--Dr. Leland--approaches him and asks, voice strained but spine straight--to please stop flirting with her, because it makes her uncomfortable.

Hawkeye is mortified. He thinks of Inga for the first time in years. She'd given him a lesson in humility that he thought he'd never forget. But he'd gone ahead and forgotten, let himself think he was being supportive without actually doing any supporting. Dr. Leland is a woman, a young, attractive woman, and flirting with women is something that Benjamin Franklin Pierce does as automatically as breathing.

He gives himself a good hard look in the mirror when he goes home that night. He's in his forties now, hardly over the hill, but a long way from the lothario of a decade ago. His hair is more gray than black. There are spiderwebs at the corners of his eyes and mouth. He thinks of Margaret Houlihan, wonders what he would have said if she'd told him that his relentless flirting made her uncomfortable. He has the creeping suspicion that he would only have laughed.

He offers his sincere apologies to Dr. Leland. She accepts them with obvious relief and a kind of gratitude that makes him wonder just what kind of reaction she was expecting.

In November, Kennedy is assassinated. Hawkeye, along with the rest of the available staff and as many patients as are ambulatory gather around the television at the nurses' station. They are watching when Lee Harvey Oswald is shot. Dr. Leland cries, bewildered and afraid. She is not the only one.

Senseless death. Fear and pain. He wonders just how much the times have changed after all.

...

It's 1968 and people are protesting again, but this time, it's young men.

People are already calling Korea the "forgotten war." But Hawkeye isn't sure that's true, not really.

He was angry back then, so angry, and everything seemed so simple, so black-and-white. Just stop the war. Just stop firing. Just let everyone go home. What the hell are we doing here? This is pointless. This is empty. Boys are dying, and for what?

It's been fifteen years and he's still angry; angrier still when he thinks of Vietnam and the sinking knowledge that humans will always find reasons to kill and maim each other. But he has perspective now, cynical perspective, but perspective all the same. He understands how Korea happened. He understands how a country, flush with the victory of WWII and the defeat of its clear-cut villains, would be ready to throw its support behind anything the military thought necessary. The Second World War gave the US and its allies the moral high ground. Why wouldn't people assume that the next war was more of the same? Just switch the Commies for the Nazis. Recycle the old slogans. Buy War Bonds!

It's not like that now. It's not like that with Vietnam. But Hawkeye thinks it might have been, if not for Korea's hard lesson. Maybe the young people he sees on the news with placards and flowers aren't thinking about Pork Chop Hill or the Pusan Perimeter. But people seem to have absorbed the fact that Korea was not a victory, moral or otherwise, and that gives them the wherewithal to publicly oppose a remarkably similar war.

Erin Hunnicut graduates from high school; she intends to enter Stanford's pre-med program, just like her dad. The photograph BJ sends him shows a tall young woman with long blond hair and big white teeth grinning underneath her mortarboard, one arm slung around BJ's shoulders. BJ looks like he might burst with pride.

Kathy McIntire joins the Peace Corps. Her dad gets battered letters from a village in Costa Rica. They're digging wells and building schools. This, they agree, is a corps they can get behind.

Is it selfish, Hawkeye wonders, to be grateful that they are not men?

...

It's 1969 and he goes to Hannibal, Missouri for Sherman Potter's funeral.

He's ashamed of himself, looking around the crowded church. Virtually the only person he still keeps in contact with from the 4077 is BJ; the only person he really sees from the same is Trapper. He hadn't even bothered to answer Radar's last letter. What was there to say, anyway? I'm still a surgeon, I'm still in Maine, I haven't slipped off my rocker lately.

There are a great many people there who aren't from the 4077th, of course--family and extended family, neighbors and colleagues, patients and friends. He meets Mildred for the first time, a formidable, dignified lady. Grandkids and great-grandkids run around underfoot.

He approaches the knot of people next to the table of cakes and jello salads with something like trepidation--him, Benjamin Franklin Pierce, almost afraid to talk to the people who practically used to live in his pocket. He's put into his place when they greet him with as much joy as is seemly given the circumstances.

How could he have let these people fade away?

How could he have let himself forget the gentleman farmer from Iowa, the one with a twelve-year-old son named Edward Benjamin? Klinger and Soon-Lee herd half-a-dozen kids through the refreshments line and he does not even know the names of the youngest three. Kealani Kellye's hair is shot through with white. Why does he have to come all the way to Missouri to see Charles, who lives in a city he visits all the time?

And Margaret.  _ Lieutenant Colonel _ Margaret Houlihan, to be precise. Jesus, it had been over a decade since he'd spoken to her. Inexcusable.

How could he have fooled himself into believing that he didn't need these fine people?

He resolves to do better. They stay up all night sort of playing poker, but mostly shooting the breeze and catching up. He was wrong. There is so much to say.

"We gotta make this regular," Radar says when it's time for them to go their separate ways. They each of them agree with alacrity. They all collect addresses. It seems he's not the only one with resolutions.

When he gets back to Portland, the Chief of Surgery calls him into his office. Hawkeye is a little afraid he's in trouble. He bears fools at fifty about as well as he did at thirty, and he manages to step on toes on the regular. But he's not in trouble--this time. Instead, Dr. Tolliver tells him that the hospital is going to set up a pediatric surgery department--the first in Maine--and he wants Hawkeye to organize it and then head it up.

He asks if he can think about it. Tolliver is clearly surprised by his lukewarm reaction, but says only that he'll need an answer by the following week.

Back in his apartment, Hawkeye stands at the picture window and watches the sky darken over the bay. He likes his apartment, likes having a place of his own to come back to, likes inviting the occasional lady up to admire this same view. He likes his job with its challenges and rewards. He's been asked to give lectures and a couple of times even to publish. He's friends with his colleagues, except for the stupid ones. He likes Portland. He likes his life. It's a good life.

He thinks about the job Tolliver is offering. He has a reputation at the hospital for getting things done without being fussy about how they get done, a method one of his superiors called "blunt force navigation." "Pierce," the man had said, half frustrated and half admiring, "you'd rather smash three roadblocks, an oak tree, and a little old lady carrying her groceries across the street rather than take the long way round."

"The long way takes too much time!" is what he'd said in response.

But that's not the only reputation he has in the hospital. It's well known that he has a "way" with families, so much so that he gives yearly training seminars to the new residents on bedside manner and how to deliver news, both good and bad, to loved ones. He supposes it's these two qualities taken together that led Tolliver to choose him. He knows it's an honor to be asked, that it demonstrates the trust the hospital has in him and his talents. But.

But.

He's operated on children before, of course. But what Tolliver has evidently never noticed is that he's never the one to reassure the child beforehand, never the one to talk to the parents after. Whenever he has a child on his docket, he always asks for an assist, preferably a resident, whom he can deputize to do these things for him. As part of their training, of course.

But if he took this job, he'd be operating exclusively on children. He'd see them pre- and post-op. All day he'd have frightened children to talk to, worried parents to soothe. Inevitably, there would be deaths, maybe even under his own knife.

His breath comes quickly, his hands grow damp. Kim. Ho John. Park Sung. The baby who was almost Radar's. The half-Korean son of a Jewish GI. The kids with their arms and legs blown off from scouring the minefields for souvenirs to sell. Sister Teresa's orphans, Nurse Cratty's orphans, maimed and frightened and traumatized victims of a war they couldn't hope to understand.

And the baby

The baby

The baby who--

But--

But that--

But that wasn't the only baby, was it?

There was another baby. She was left on the doorstep of the Swamp. They passed her from hand to hand. Klinger built her a cradle. Father Mulcahy showed rare distress, explaining to them why she couldn't go to an orphanage. They'd tried--they'd  _ tried _ to get her sent to America, but no one would help them. And that story had ended with a bell in the night and a long, silent drive home.

He remembers that Major, that high-and-mighty horse's backside, asking why they cared so much about this little nothing baby. "Unless one of you is the daddy?" he'd said, smarmy and insinuating.

He watches Portland bay and wishes, wishes with all his might and main, that he'd used that smart mouth of his for good for once and said, "yes, that's right. I am the daddy."

Maybe

Maybe

Maybe then...

He drops his head into his hands. He knows why he let his friendships with the others in the 4077 all but atrophy, as if doing so would make what happened there somehow less real. As if erasing those friendships would erase everything else.

He knows he can't take the job. He knew it the minute Tolliver asked. He stays up all night rehearsing his refusal. He'll recommend that Dr. Leland head it up instead.

He likes his life. It's a good life.

But sometimes he's still on the bus.

...

It's April 1970 and he meets someone.

BJ laughs at him over the phone when he tells him. "Whatever you say, Hawk," he says.

Hawkeye doesn't blame him for laughing. There have been a thousand someones before. For reasons he has trouble explaining, this is different.

Her name is Elva and even though she hasn't been home to Kentucky since she was twenty years old, she still retains the soft twang and rounded vowels of her upbringing. It's adorable, and that's the least thing he likes about her.

She's been sent to Portland General to overhaul the ER's nursing procedures. For this reason, everyone is prepared to hate her. But no one does--at least, no one who matters. Five foot naught, thin as a lathe, sharp when she has to be, gentle when she needs to be; within six months of her arrival, the efficiency rating of Portland General's ER department skyrockets.

As the head of trauma surgery, he has a lot to do with the ER, and from the moment he meets her he has a visceral desire to impress her. But not with the patented Benjamin Pierce charm. No, that's suddenly not enough--not by half. He doesn't want her to jump into bed with him--at least, not right now. He wants her to respect him.

So he asks her to detail her plans for the nurses. He listens attentively and asks questions. He makes sure that his own procedures integrate with hers, the better to make the transition from the ER to his own department.

"Nurse York has been asking about you," the chief perioperative nurse tells him one day.

"Is that right?" he asks, feigning indifference. "What's she asking?"

"What kind of surgeon you are, how you are with patients. That kind of thing." Edith looks at him with a wry sort of smile. Not much gets by Edith. "She says you've gone out of your way to make her life easier with the surgical departments. I told her, what do you expect from a fellow Korea vet?"

He looks at Edith sharply. "She's a vet?"

"You didn't know? She retired from the Nurse Corps at the end of last year. You ought to talk to her about it. I bet you two have a lot in common."

He doesn't particularly want to trade war stories with Elva York. But there's no denying he wants to get to know her better. When she agrees to go on a date with him, he's determined to make it the perfect evening. He plans everything to the last detail. The only thing he forgets is to make reservations at the restaurant.

"Honey," she says, when they're turned away at the door, "I know for a  _ fact _ that y'all've not got spiderwebs for brains."

Which he interprets to mean, "wipe that mortified expression off your face and think of something else for us to do."

If she were any other woman, he would have said something glib: "It's just as well. The meal was just an hors d'oeuvre anyway." He would have invited her up to his apartment. And he would have been satisfied. But he doesn't do that tonight. Not with her.

"You haven't been in Maine long," he says. "You had a chance to try lobster fresh from the bay?"

In the falling twilight of a Maine summer evening, they sit on a bench by the pier, balancing paper plates of lobster tails on their knees and trying not to drip butter on their fine clothes. He tries to show her how to tear the fins off so the meat will slip out, but she waves him away. "Just like a crawdad," she says. "You never forget how."

Not  _ just _ like a crawdad, evidently, because he relishes the way her eyes close when she tastes that first sweet mouthful. She chews, swallows, smiles. She smiles with her whole face, every single tooth and most of her gums, too. Just like he does.

They talk. They eventually get around to Korea. She started and ended the war at Tokyo General, with a foray in the middle at the 5026th. "I wanted to stay," she says, "but my younger brother was killed on the front. They transferred me back to Tokyo after that."

"I'm really sorry," he says.

"Well, me too," she says. "But it was a long time ago." She looks at him sidelong. "So," she says, "the infamous four-oh-seven-seven."

He discovers it isn't difficult to trade war stories with Elva York after all.

A month later, the hospital is buzzing. Dr. Pierce and Nurse York! No! Really? I wouldn't have pegged her for his type! Too skinny. Not young enough...you know? Well, he's not getting any younger either...

He takes her to meet Trapper. She and Louise get along like a house on fire. They sit on the couch with glasses of wine and chat like they've known each other forever while he and Trapper are left at the kitchen table picking at the remains of an apple pie. "They're talking about us, you know," Trapper says.

"All good things, I'm sure," Hawkeye says. He's always Hawkeye with Trapper--and BJ, and the rest of the 4077. But with Elva, he's Ben. Or sometimes Benjamin, depending on if she's annoyed with him or not.

"This is the first lady you've ever brought over," Trapper says. "And she's not like any lady I've ever seen you with, either."

"No," Hawkeye says, "she's not."

Trapper looks at him, that knowing half-smile on his face. "You're really serious this time, aren't you?"

"Trap," Hawkeye says, "I'm going to marry that woman."


	3. Chapter 3

It's January 1971 and he gets a terse letter from Margaret saying that she's transferring to the 93rd Evac Hospital in Long Binh.

Becky McIntyre's fiance ships out to Saigon. Jack Hunnicut is old enough to be worried about what will happen when he graduates high school. They are starting to see veterans at the hospital, twenty-one, twenty-two-year-old men shaking with DTs, young men with old mens' eyes, scars on their wrists and on the insides of their arms and inside where no one can see.

The kicker comes when his favorite resident, the one he's sure will succeed him one day, takes him aside and asks if he can talk to him about his experiences in Korea sometime. Dave Finnegan is about to finish his residency and he thinks he'll probably be drafted right away. The young man tries desperately to put a brave face on it, but Hawkeye can see the fear buried in his eyes. Suddenly he's 29 again, holding the notice from Selective Service and trying not to faint. He doesn't know what to say. He tells Dave sure, they'll talk. Then he goes home and blows his top.

Elva has never seen him quite like this. They don't live together, but when she gets off shift she often goes back to his apartment to wait for him. She's there now, watching him pace the living room, ranting.

He covers all the basics. Senseless killing. Pointless wars. Yet another country pocked with landmines, its citizens dead or displaced. And the army. The great, much-vaunted, all-powerful American army, who not only knew what was best for everyone back home, but for everyone in Korea, in Vietnam, in any other country they turned their minds to invading.

"And let's not forget," he said, warming to his theme, "the young men they pluck from their homes, their families, and then send back as empty shells of themselves. You know, because it's the American way. Bombs, bullets, and civil war, that's the legacy of the red, white and blue!"

Elva lets him talk himself out, watches as he throws himself onto the couch across from her. "Are you done?" she asks quietly.

Her accent has suddenly grown thick as molasses. He has that sense of unease he always gets when he's done with a really serious rant, the sense that he's said twice as much as he intended and meant only half of it. A look at Elva's face, composed and still as stone, only increases his disquiet.

When he doesn't say anything, she goes on. "Do you have any idea what my life was like before I joined the army?"

She's never told him much about her childhood. She tells him now. The thirties were unkind to just about everyone, but while he was enjoying the relative privilege of being the only son of the town doctor, being paid in eggs and spring lettuce and milk and washing if not in cash, she and her twelve siblings put in the depression in a rough-hewn cabin on the outskirts of Greenville, Kentucky. Her father was a day laborer and a purveyor of bathtub gin, her mother was a professional invalid. Her oldest siblings were married and gone almost before she could remember them. The rest of the children raised themselves.

She and two older sisters fought tooth and nail to get into nursing school, run by the Catholics in Louisville. The entire class enlisted upon graduation. They were taken straight from the school to nearby Fort Knox for basic training. Her parents, who had not come to her graduation, did not see her off.

"It was 1948," she said. "I was twenty-one years old. They took us to the mess hall and gave us some dinner."

She took a deep breath. "We had to pay our own room and board in nursing school. Well, you can imagine what kind of board I could afford to pay. Ben, when I saw that tray of food, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. You can't know what it's like to be given food, clothes, a bed, money of your own--you can't know 'less you've never had enough of any of those things. And all I had to do in return was what I'd always wanted to do in the first place--be a good nurse."

"I didn't mean--" he begins.

She cuts him off. "I'm not done. I've lived my life the best I can, served people the best I know how. I'm proud of the work I did for the army. But you just good as said that I shouldn't be."

"That's not what I--"

"No, you didn't mean nurses, I guess," she continues. "You just meant men, right? The people who volunteered to fight. Well, maybe you ought to remember that not every boy you patched up in Korea was dragged over there kickin' and screamin'. An awful lot of those boys were volunteers, just like me. And what about your Colonel Potter? You told me he was regular army, didn't you? World War one and Two. He didn't join up as a doctor, did he? Do you really think he come out of those wars with his hands clean? Did he leave Korea an empty shell of himself?"

"No," Hawkeye says, "he didn't."

"And I'll bet I know exactly why he enlisted, too," Elva says. "It's because he really thought he was doin' the right thing. My brother Forrest was the same, and I gotta believe, Ben--I  _ gotta _ believe that he didn't die for no reason. He died doin' what he thought was right, and maybe he was mistaken about that, but you don't get to say he was bad or immoral for it. You unnerstan' me?"

"Yeah, Elva," he says, "I understand."

They are quiet for a time before he says, "I need to tell you what happened to me in Korea."

He hasn't talked about that night on the bus since he told Trapper John, so many years ago. He hadn't been forthcoming then, glossing over this, skipping over that. He doesn't do that with Elva. He tells her everything.

He finds himself talking not just about the baby on the bus, but also the other baby, the one they left at the mission. He doesn't even realize until he starts talking that in his head, he's conflated the two. At length he's talked himself out. He looks up at Elva. She's looking at him with such compassion.

"Oh, my Lord, Ben," she says. "I never saw anything like that. Never in all my years."

He looks out the window. It's dark outside and all he can see is his reflection. "Elva, I shouldn't have made you think I was judging you," he said. "I guess it's easy to think of the army as this--this Hydra, with mortars and machine guns for heads. It's easy to forget that it's made up of individuals and that makes things more complicated." He shakes his head. "But this war--the things that are happening, that keep happening, I can't--"

He buries his head in his hands. "Every time I let myself think to hard about it, I--I--I'm back on the bus." He looks back up at her bleakly. "How many dead children are there in Vietnam, do you think? How many orphans? People say war is hell. But there aren't innocent bystanders in hell."

She sits next to him on the couch, puts her tiny arms around him, pulls his head to her shoulder. "I don't know, Ben," she says. "I just don't know."

It occurs to him then that Elva retired early from the army for an unmarried lady. He briefly considers asking her why. Then he realizes he probably already knows.

They sit like this for a long time. Then Elva says, "You know, Ben, that little girl you gave the nuns didn't disappear into thin air."

He sits up and looks at her, surprised by this apparent non sequitur. "What?"

"I mean, either she's still there, or the nuns sent her someplace. Catholics are big on records, you know. Don't you have a chaplain friend who would know the name of the mission? At the very least you could find out what happened to her."

He stares at her in astonishment bordering on awe. How long since they put that baby in the turnstile and rang the bell? And never once had it occurred to him to do this.

"Oh, my God, Elva," he says. "Oh, my God."

...

It's June of 1971 and the name of the mission, run by French Dominicans, is Notre-Dame d'Aide Perpetuelle. That is to say, that WAS the name of the mission, which is now defunct. Father--that is to say  _ Monseigneur-- _ Mulcahy is afire to help.

"The nuns would probably have been absorbed by a nearby convent, most likely in Soeul," he says, high voice dim over the bad phone connection. "I'll make inquiries for you, Hawkeye. It shouldn't be too hard to find out where they went. We Catholics keep good records, you know."

"I've heard that," Hawkeye says. "But what about the girl? Would she have gone to the new convent too? The nuns wouldn't have dumped her in an orphanage, would they?"

"Extremely unlikely," Mulcahy says, "if for no other reason than the mission only closed two years ago, making her about sixteen years old. That's an adult in Korean society, and an orphanage wouldn't have taken her. Aside from that, she is their ward. They'll have educated her. The most likely scenario is that she is a novice, a trainee nun."

"If she's taken vows as a nun, she won't be able to leave," Hawkeye says.

"Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves," Mulcahy says. "For one thing, she may have already chosen to leave the convent. They are hardly prisons, you know. It's possible the nuns may have made arrangements for her to go abroad, which was, if you'll remember, what we'd hoped in the first place. And even if she is a novice, she won't have taken binding vows yet." There is a pause. "What are you planning, Hawkeye?"

He hesitates. "I'm not sure, Father," he says. He'd hoped--well, he's almost not sure what he'd hoped. He had a nebulous sort of plan, a vague, formless  _ something _ that he hadn't even ventured to tell Elva. "I guess...I guess for now I just want to know what happened to her."

"I'll find out everything I can," Mulcahy promises. "Hawkeye--may I ask what brought on this line of inquiry?"

"It's something my fiancee suggested," he says. "To tell you the truth, Father, I'm ashamed I didn't think of it myself, and sooner."

"Your fiancee! Hawkeye!"

He grins into the receiver. It's the first time he's been able to refer to Elva by that word and he relishes it.

...

It's October 1971 and there's a letter.

It's been opened by the censor and carelessly re-sealed with Scotch tape, a bright red approval stamp on the back flap. Chunky Hangul script covers the top half of the battered square envelope, followed by slanting English giving his own address: Benjamin Pierce, 45 Hanover Street, Portland Maine, 04123, United States of America.

It's starting to rain and he hurries into the little yellow-painted house to open it. He's written--he's not sure how many letters, made more phone calls than he can count as he and Father Mulcahy worked their way through the Catholic establishments of South Korea--all the ones they could find out about, anyway. Father Mulcahy's network of contacts still in Korea and Elva's rapport with the Red Cross expedited the process somewhat, but more often than not the answer was, "Notre-Dame d'Aide Perpetuelle? Southwest of Uijongbu? Sorry, I have never heard of this place." Occasionally, the response was hopeful. "The Dominicans near Uijongbu? Yes, I remember them. They went to Goyang, I think" or "Last I heard they opened up a school in Mokpo." But whether they had been in Goyang or Mokpo or any other place they had looked so far, they were not there now. It seemed that even the Catholic Church's much-vaunted prowess at keeping records was no match for the chaos of postwar Korea.

They had even begun making inquiries in France, trying to find out which Benedictine house had founded that particular mission in Korea--an endeavor somewhat hampered by the fact that neither Father Mulcahy nor Hawkeye spoke French. But the religious houses in France were many-- _ many _ many--and they had no way of knowing whether the mother house in question was even still extant. It was slow, discouraging work.

He turns the letter over and over in his hands. He is almost afraid to open it. He's gotten letters before, of course, but the grand majority have been from the Red Cross, with a few hurried missives from the harried and overstretched Archdiocese of Soeul thrown in for variety. This one seems--it seems different. Special. At length he opens it carefully and slides out the fragile rice paper within.

It is covered with slanted, spidery writing that matches the handwriting on the envelope.  _ Dear Doctor Pierce, _ it begins,  _ My name is Souer Marie-Angelique Bisset and in the year 1953 I was the Prioress of Notre-Dame d'Aide Perpetuelle near Uijongbu. _

He puts the paper down. His palms are suddenly sweaty; he gets up and paces the living room, six steps from couch to window, three to Elva's easy chair, three to the fireplace. This is it. This is  _ it _ . Now if only he could pluck of the courage to read the rest.

In a rush, he strides to the end table and snatches the letter up again.

_ Dear Doctor Pierce, _

_ My name is Mere Marie-Angelique Bisset and in the year 1952 I was the Prioress at Le Mission de Notre-Dame d'Aide Perpetuelle near Uijongbu. _

_ I received a letter from our sister school in Inchon with a note enclosed from a certain Monseigneur Francis Mulcahy. It seems the Monseigneur has been inquiring for news of this mission and in particular for news of a certain young girl who was placed anonymously with us in September of 1952. Your address was included in his note. _

_ Many children were placed at Le Mission d'Aide Perpetuelle during my years there, mostly girls of mixed descent. It was our work and the Lord's to take in these lost souls and educate them for the glory of God. Many of these girls chose to take the veil themselves. _

_ When the mission closed in 1969, our sisters were divided among various houses in South Korea. I was sent to Suwon with our youngest sisters. I am now the headmistress of a school for girls there. With me is a young novice named Souer Marie-Bernadette Min-Soo. _

_ As Prioress, I kept the records of the children entrusted to us and I have those records still in my possession. After perusing the relevant dates, I am certain Souer Marie-Bernadette is young woman you are seeking. _

_ It is now my duty to inquire after your intentions. It rarely happens that someone asks after one of our children, especially so many years after the fact. As one of my novices, the welfare of Souer Marie-Bernadette is in my keeping and I do not intend to allow you to write or contact her in any way until I understand why you wish to do so. You see, I do not really know who you are. Perhaps you would be willing to provide references to this effect. I hope you do not take offense at this request. It is only that my years in this war-torn country has led me to exercise a certain prudence, especially when it comes to strange men who enquire about young girls. _

_ Please direct all further letters to myself at L'ecole de la Mission de Saint Agnès, Suwon-si, Gyeonggi Province, Republic of South Korea. I suggest you send your letter by way of the Red Cross, which is adept at navigating our unreliable postal system. _

_ In Christ, _

_ Mere Marie-Angelique Bisset _

_ Directress, L'ecole de la Mission de Saint Agnès _

He had wondered how he would react in this moment--when he had at long last discovered the name and location of this long sought-after girl. Would he cry? Would he be unable to believe it? Would he call everyone he knew and tell them the good news? He does none of these things. What he does instead is laugh.

It's the paragraph about his intentions that does it. How many times had he been face-to-face with a stern father demanding that very thing? This was, he reflected between guffaws, the first time he has ever been called to the carpet by a nun.

Elva picks this moment to come home. She raises her eyebrows at the sight of him in paroxyms of laughter all by himself. "I sure do wish you'd tell me what the joke is," she says. "I just spent the last four hours browbeating the financial department into fixing an insurance foul-up."

In reply, he hands her the letter. She scans the first couple of lines, then gasps. "Ben! Is this--"

"It's her, Elva," he says. "We found her. We really found her."

She sits slowly, still reading. When she's finished, she wipes her eyes.

"Min-Soo," he says. "What a pretty name."

"Have you called Father Mulcahy yet?" Elva asks. "And if she wants references, you oughta call around to your old campmates, too. Could be someone even has a photograph of her. At the very least they can back up your story."

He tries to remember. "I don't remember anyone taking her picture," he says. "Radar had a camera, but he was gone by then...no, I don't think anyone did." He stands up. "Damn! What a missed opportunity."

"Well, you could hardly have imagined this particular situation," she says. "You go on. Make your phone calls. I'll get ready."

"Ready for what?"

"To go out, of course! We're celebrating."

In two steps he's in front of her, lifting her in the air in a bear hug. "Elva Pierce, you can read my thoughts before I even have them!"

"And don't you forget it!" Elva says.

It's three hours earlier in California, so Hawkeye calls BJ at his office instead of at home. After a brief chat with the secretary he's never met, but whom he secretly refers to as "Sarge," BJ picks up. "Hawk! How's tricks?"

"BJ, I found her," Hawkeye says without preamble. "The baby, I found her."

There is a long silence before BJ says carefully, "Hawk, what are you talking about?"

Oh. Whoops. "No no no no no no," Hawkeye says. "No no no. You remember. The baby that got left outside the Swamp. The one we tried to have sent to the States."

"We left her at the mission," BJ says. "Yes, of course I remember. But what do you mean you  _ found _ her?"

"I mean I found her! Well, we found her. Me and Elva and Father Mulcahy. We've been looking for months. She's a novice nun at a school in Suwon. I just got a letter today from her, from her Mother Superior, I guess. Marie-Bernadette Min-Soo. Isn't that a name?"

BJ sounds a little bewildered. "Well--well, that's great, I mean--Hawkeye, you're sure it's her?"

"Sure as I can be," Hawkeye said.

"Well," BJ says again, "well. That's just--that's great. I've thought about her, you know. I'm glad to hear she's doing all right." There is a pause. "How come you never told me you and Father Mulcahy were looking for her?"

Hawkeye sighs. "I dunno, Beej," he says. "I guess I was waiting til we had something to go on, you know? Instead of it just sounding like one big wild goose chase. We literally came up with nothing until this very day. And get this, her Mother Superior wants references for me. Wants to know if I am who I say I am!"

"Instead of who? The Pope?" Hawkeye is relieved to hear humor coloring his friend's voice. "Don't worry, I'll write her a nice long letter that doesn't even mention your side business of sending orphan ponies to glue factories."

"I knew I could count on you," Hawkeye says.

"Now that you've found her," BJ says, "what are you planning to do?"

"Elva and I have talked it over," Hawkeye says. "We want to sponsor her. We'll bring her to the States. Better late than never, you know?"

"Have you thought about whether maybe--" BJ hesitates, then plunges on "I think you should consider the possibility that she may not want to come."

"What do you mean?" Hawkeye says. "Why wouldn't she want to come?"

"Look, the last thing I want is to rain on your parade," BJ says, "but she's, what, eighteen? She's spent her whole life with those nuns. That's her home. Maybe she doesn't want to leave it."

Hawkeye doesn't really want to hear this, but he knows BJ has a point. "Doesn't being right all the time get annoying?" he asks.

BJ laughs softly. "And maybe she'll be out of her mind with excitement to come to America. Hawk, it's amazing that you found her. Really amazing. And I hope--I hope we all get to see her again. I really do. Now give me the address for her Mother Superior before you have to listen to a grown man cry."

...

It's August of 1972 and he and Elva are on a roadtrip to Springfield, Massachusetts.

This is not how he planned it. It just isn't what he had in mind at all.

In his head, Min-Soo stays in the warm, bright little back bedroom in their house on Hanover street. In his head, she goes back to school, maybe even college. She trains for a nurse, or an anesthesiologist, or a laboratory tech and they help her get a job at Portland General. He had it all planned out, this life of hers.

But Sister Marie-Bernadette Min-Soo is a person of mettle, an educated young woman who knows her own mind. Aside from Korean, she is fluent in French, proficient in English, and reads, in her own words, "a pretty okay Latin." At St. Agnes's school for girls in Suwon, she assisted the high school math teacher. "I do not teach myself," she says in one letter, "because I am not old enough, and also because the parents of the girls do not want a twigi teaching their daughters. What they do not know is that I grade all the papers. I am the one who says which is a dunce!"

It took quite a bit of asking around before he was able to find out what a "twigi" was, and when he at last learned that it was a derogatory word for a mixed-race Korean, he decided to extend his invitation to come to America in his very next letter. He had been waiting for the right time. This, he was sure, was it. This, he was sure, was the opportunity she had been waiting for.

But "I shall have to give your offer some thought," is her rather restrained reply, and it is not until her next letter that she says, "I have often wondered what it is like in America. When I was a child" (" _ When _ she was a child!" Hawkeye exclaims to Elva) "When I was a child, I sometimes looked at the stars and wondered if my American father was looking at the same stars. Of course, that was before I knew it is day in America if night in Korea. I thought, 'if only he knew I was here. He would find me and take me to America with him.' And I would pray as hard as I could. But later I understood that he abandoned my mother and me, and I no longer wished to go to the country where he lived.

"I read over and over your account of how you and your friends found me in your camp and how you took care of me and tried to have me sent to America. I think about my poor mother, forced to leave me with strangers. You had to leave me with strangers too. It was very hard for you, I know. I can read it in your letter. I also hear from others--from Doctor BJ Hunnicut, and Mister Maxwell Klinger who has a Korean wife, and a lady in Viet Nam, Margaret Houlihan. These letters are very strange to read and also wonderful. Once again I find myself wishing to go to America. I see on a map in the school that it is a very big country. I find Portland, Maine and Toledo, Ohio and San Francisco, California. All so very far from each other.

"But you see, I have a good life. I love the nuns, my sisters. Mere Marie-Angelique is my true mother. I am lucky, much more lucky than others like me. The nuns teach me, not just to read and do sums. They teach me about my immortal soul and a Father who never abandons me. I find my vocation here. I wish to take vows. This is not something I wish to give up, not even to come to America to see you."

It is humbling--so humbling. This eighteen-year-old girl, this little nun in training, wiser in her third language than he is in his first and only. BJ was right all along, and he'd been constructing castles in the air about someone he didn't actually know.

But there is something else in her letter--something he folds into himself, holds close to his heart. When he'd rung that bell, placed the baby in the turntable and closed the door, he'd felt so bleak. They all had. It was as if she had disappeared--not just from their lives, but actually. But against all odds, she had not just survived but thrived. His mental picture of the mission changes. It is no longer a prison, no longer a place where children are swallowed up, but one of sanctuary. Leaving her there was their only real choice. But now he knows, with relief so sweet it almost brings him to tears, that it was the right one, too.

Elva is driving. They are just about to enter Massachusetts and the sky is a dull gray. "You want to stop in Boston?" he asks.

She glances at him. "Do you?"

"We could switch," he says.

"Not a chance," she says. "You're hopeless at drivin' in the rain."

"We could get lunch," he says.

"It's ten-thirty in the morning," she reminds him. "Ben, you're not tryin' to delay this, are you? After so long?"

He looks out the window. "It's just that I've never visited a convent before," he says, trying to joke.

She reaches over and pats his knee. "Stop fretting. She'll love you."

"If only this place weren't in Springfield," he laments. "What a great first impression! 'Welcome to our country! Here's your new home. To your left you'll see an abandoned factory, to your right you'll have a spectacular view of the overpass.'"

Elva hits him in the shoulder. "Oh, stop that! The Dominicans have a very nice place there. And a school--she can teach, for real this time."

They've been over all this before. Over it and over it, ever since Min-Soo had formally requested a transfer to Our Lady of the Rosary Domincan Abbey in Springfield.

"I wished to surprise you," she wrote. "I have been thinking very hard about this and also talking to Mere Marie-Angelique. You see, I wish to teach and I cannot do it here. But these American nuns have a school too. We have been in correspondence with them. They are prepared to accept me as a novice as soon as we complete  _ la bureaucratie _ ."

A poetic word for "red tape" if he ever heard it. But several factors expedite her emigration. The Republic of Korea, for instance, is only to happy to see yet another mixed-race child go. And being a member of a Roman Catholic religious house, one which will guarantee food and board and employment, is a relief to the American immigration board.

Hence their pilgrimage, a shockingly short time later, to Springfield, Massachusetts, where Sister Marie-Bernadette Min-Soo waits for them.

This is not how he planned it. It just isn't what he had in mind at all.

They get a flat on the outskirts of Springfield just as the sky opens up into an August thunderstorm. They are forced to run for a rather seedy-looking hardware store, the proprietor of which barely looks up when they burst in, dripping.

"You sell umbrellas?" Hawkeye asks, and the man points a grubby finger at a stand on the other side of the counter. He buys the umbrella and goes back out to see what he can do about the spare.

"Well?" Elva demands, when he comes back in just a few short minutes later.

"The spare's flat too," he says.

"Damn," she says.

"Hey buddy," Hawkeye says, "you got a phone where we can call a taxi?"

The man guffaws. "A taxi? Here? Sorry, pal. You got to go anywhere, you'll have to wait for the bus. Comes across the street." He jerks a thumb out the window and Hawkeye can just make out a sign. No awning, of course.

He looks at Elva, who shrugs eloquently. "Fine. That's great, thanks," he says to the proprietor. "You got a bus schedule?"

The man shakes his head. "Ain't a big town," he says. "You want the auto shop, you get on here, get off at Prince."

"We want Our Lady of the Rosary," Elva says.

His eyebrows go up. "The nuns? You'll have to transfer at Holiday street, then."

They wait for him to elaborate. When he does not, Hawkeye says, "Well, you've been a big help."

"Jackass," he mutters, when they are out of the shop, huddling together under the umbrella.

"I'll get the map from the car," Elva says. "We'll find it."

The bus, when it comes, is as tired and gray as the town around it. A handful of people sit steaming in wet clothes, puddles of water streaming from umbrellas and raincoats. No one looks up when they board. Elva has a conference with the monosyllabic driver, which at least assures them that they should, in fact, get off at Holliday and transfer to the blue line, the terminus of which was the Abbey.

"Convenient," Elva says, as they sit.

"Long," Hawkeye says.

It is a long trip. By the time they transfer, the rain has stopped, the clouds are clearing away, and the sun glows on the wet pavement. The bus slowly empties. At the second-to-last stop, the only other passenger gets off. They stare out the window. The Abbey is situated on large piece of land, set back from the main road. There is a great deal of green before they arrive at the gate. "Last stop!" the driver says, rather unnecessarily, as the road itself terminates.

Elva precedes him down the steps. "Look Ben!" she says excitedly, pointing. "It's her! That's her, I'm sure of it!"

The gates of the abbey are open to car traffic. A short distance down the drive is a small figure in bright white, a black cord round her waist. The veil, pushed back from her forehead, reveals dark hair. She puts up her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the sun.

He keeps his eyes on her.

He steps off the bus.

__


End file.
